Ceo of apple computer

Consumer portable gives Apple users everything they like about the iMac

NEW YORK - The long wait came to an end as Apple CEO Steve Jobs pulled back the veil around its much anticipated consumer portable.

Coming in tangerine and blueberry colours, and made to open with the ease of today's cellular phones, the iBook is designed to give users everything they like about the popular iMac but with a flip-up handle so it can be carried like a briefcase.

"We went to our consumer and education customers and asked what they wanted in a portable," said Jobs of Apple Computer Inc. in Cupertino, Calif. "We listened very carefully and when we added it all up, what they wanted was an iMac-to-go."

The iBook will be hitting stores and sold on Apple's Web site in September for the back-to-school rush. It will be priced at US$1,599. The iBook comes with a 300 MHz G3 processor, 32MB of RAM, a 3.2GB hard drive, built-in 56K modem, USB port and 10/100 ethernet card, a 24X CD-ROM and an ATI Rage graphics card.

Jobs also pointed to iBook's 12.1-inch TFT active matrix screen as a major selling point, along with the six-hour battery life.

"We care a great deal about displays and they are very important on a portable," Jobs added. "The display is the window onto software applications and onto the Internet. A lot of portables out there right now have really poor displays. We want to set the bar even higher and we have put in a 12.1 inch screen with 800-by-600 resolution with millions of colors. And we still wanted groundbreaking battery life. We wanted it so good you would not have to buy a second battery and you don't have to bring your charger to school all day long."

The iBooks support Apple's AirPort wireless networking solution developed with Lucent Technologies. Using an AirPort Card installed under the iBook's keyboard, it allows up to 11 Mbps throughput at transmission distances of up to 150 feet from the AirPort access point, which resembles a little silver UFO. Up to 10 iBooks can work off of the AirPort access point.

The iBook has a built-in USB port, like the desktop-based iMac. When USB was first introduced, there were some 25 USB-ready devices on the market. Now there are some 125 USB-ready devices with 100 more to be introduced over the next few months, such as NEC's portable USB scanner and the Epson and Cannon USB-ready multifunction printers. Both were showcased at MacWorld Expo, drawing eager crowds.

"We realized we had a chance of taking a big leap forward in how the iMac could interact with peripheral devices," Jobs said. "So we dropped the legacy I/O we had for something better."

However, the move to USB has meant iMac users with parallel or SCSI-based peripherals were left out in the cold. Several companies saw this an opportunity to offer adapters that carried older devices into the USB age, and they showed their solutions at MacWorld Expo.

"We were one of the most prominent companies selling serial cards for the Mac," said Mike Ridenhour, president of Richmond, Calif.-based Keyspan. "The whole world changed for us when Apple brought in iMac and took away all of the standard serial technology and replaced it with USB. What that did was drive demand for adapters that would allow you to connect legacy, classical serial devices to these devices, printers, modems, Palm Pilots and graphics tablets."

Lake Forest, Calif.-based Entrega Technologies Inc. also displayed a variety of serial and SCSI converters. It pushed its newly released Hubs for Mac, which offer additional USB ports through the single USB port on the iMac and iBook.

"And we are seeing that the conversion of old legacy devices (to USB) is becoming more important, because people don't want to throw out all of this money they invested in these devices," said Gregg Wilkes, vice-president of sales and marketing for Entrega.

Wilkes added resellers and VARs should finds the adapters and hub an attractive add-on to peripheral and iMac or iBook sales since it should help ease support and service issues that have often plagued parallel and SCSI peripheral sales. In Canada, Entrega's solutions are available to resellers through Keating Technologies.

"For the VAR space, where they make money in installation and tech support, it makes that whole piece more profitable because they don't spend all of their time doing it and makes their customers more satisfied," Wilkes continued. "And they come back to buy more devices.

Another company helping VARs get into the expanding Mac market is Novato, Calif.-based DriveSavers Data Recovery Inc. Kelly Montana, retail sales manager for DriveSavers is offering resellers a commission for getting Mac consumers to use its Apple-authorized data recovery services. The resellers will be given 10 per cent of the cost of recovering the data. The company has rescued data from some severely damaged machines, such as a notebook run over by a bus and another that spent two days at the bottom of the Amazon river, Montana added. In fact, DriveSavers displayed the shattered Mac laptop that was run over by the bus at their booth.